Civilization, we have heard for at least three thousand years, is in decline; its old values have faded, and all that is left is cynical, stupid, short-sighted self-interest. Our world has become shallow, ugly and weak.

[...]

Experience tells us, however, that if the purpose of a critique of decadence is to induce a return to the past, it has always failed and will always fail. Even at the ripe age of three thousand years old (or more, depending on where we mark its birth), civilization is, we now know, a relatively new arrival on the scene of human co-existence. It is an expansive and progressive form of life that brings great changes to 'primitive' forms of life. To renew its values, then, cannot really mean a return to the past; at the very least, any reference to the past must be much more recent than the boundlessly archaic visions that the theorists of decadence have always invoked. That Spengler is referring to ancient Rome in his discussion of architecture already gives the lie to the claim to a more ancient than ancient. Equally, in Spengler's doctrine of blood, a modern biological innovation masquerades as ancient wisdom. And it is no accident that Spengler's biological idea of 'blood' as a symbol for the long-lost past would be plagiarized in the years to come by the Nazi movement. His invocation of the glorious architecture of the past foreshadows the ludicrous and terrifying neo-Romanist gigantism of Nazi architecture. Fascism in general could be described as a fraudulent attempt, in a decadent world, to return to the values of the past. It is a conservatism as hollow, decadent and modern as the liberal world it makes war upon.

Notwithstanding its hollowness, the idea of decadence has a peculiarly universal relevance as I write these words. For surely, behind every invocation of our 'troubled times', the permanent refrain of panic and economic catastrophe, the old wisdom that 'we have lived beyond our means', is the old critique of decadence, the old prediction of a coming calamity that will punish us for our sins. The sheer scale and ubiquity of the new global financial crisis induce a powerful, hypnotic emotional response, a terror, that would seem all the more clearly to prescribe a stance of unflinching objectivity, reasonability or even an 'audacity of hope.'